Exit Polls

Few aspects of modern American politics are as inherently useful to political scientists, party strategists, and the news media as exit polls—surveys taken of voters as they leave polling places around the country. The polls not only provide an election day hint of the outcomes of the major contests before the actual voting concludes, but they also offer a wealth of information about the demographics of the electorate and the issues and attitudes that shaped their voting decisions.

Yet few aspects of modern American politics have been more prone to controversy. A sampling error in Florida prompted networks to declare early on Election Night 2000 that Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore had won a crucial victory in that state; the subsequent retraction of that projection and the networks' call later in the evening that Republican George W. Bush had won the state and the election helped create the atmosphere of confusion that prevailed over the five weeks during which Gore contested the result in Florida, which ultimately was resolved in Bush's favor.

In a subsequent internal investigation, the Voter News Service (VNS), which had conducted exit polls for a combine of TV networks and the Associated Press wire service, identified a number of errors in its exit polling model and practices that contributed to the erroneous data. Among them was a failure to recognize the growing importance of early voting, resulting in a miscalculation of Florida's absentee voting.

The low point for national exit polling came in 2002, when early counts, or “runs,” of survey results on election day turned up percentages for competing candidates that appeared (and in many cases turned out to be) so inaccurate that the TV networks' polling combine withheld and never published them.

These problems prompted the National Election Pool, as the network combine is known, to scrap its old system and hire two companies, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, to jointly produce the exit polls beginning with the 2004 elections. The latter company was owned by Warren Mitofsky, who originated modern exit polling in 1967 while working for CBS News; Mitofsky died in 2006 at age 71.

The 2004 presidential exit polls did not cause the kind of controversy the 2000 polls did, but they were not free from criticism. Early runs in key states such as Florida and Ohio showed Democratic challenger John Kerry leading President Bush. When these numbers were leaked, primarily by political Web log or “blog” sites on the Internet, they caused an optimistic buzz among Democratic activists, consternation among Republicans, and a skewed perspective among reporters preparing for the election night coverage. Bush won both of those battleground states to clinch his reelection.

Exit polling experts blamed those who leaked the early information, not the polls themselves. “Doing an early poll is like reporting the results of the game at halftime,” said Joe Lenski, Mitofsky's polling partner, in 2004, during a postelection interview with the Associated Press. “You only have about a third of the information. No other survey research is held to that level of accuracy.” Lenski said that exit poll runs done later in the day more accurately reflected the final outcomes.

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